Thursday, 20 June 2019, 14:00-17:00
Bushuis, F2.08B (Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam)
You are warmly invited to attend the symposium and book launch of Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe, edited by Carole Rawcliffe and Claire Weeda.
Program Symposium
14.00-14.40| Carole Rawcliffe (University of East Anglia)
Cleaning up the Middle Ages: A Few Words about Policing the Urban Environment
14.50-15.30| Fritz Dross (Institut für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin)
“Portzel” – A Premodern Piece on Public Health and Public Order
15.30-15.50| Coffee and Tea Break
15.50-16.30| Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes University)
Broken Bridges and Crowded Calle: Policing Urban Ideals and Realities in Early Modern Venice
16.30-17.00| Claire Weeda (Leiden University)
Closing Remarks
The event will be followed by drinks from 17.00 at Café Luxembourg (Spui 24, Amsterdam).
Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe, ed. by Carole Rawcliffe and Claire Weeda, is published by Amsterdam University Press in the series Premodern Crime and Punishment.
Contributors: Elma Brenner, Janna Coomans, Luke Demaitre, Catherine Dubé, Geneviève Dumas, G. Geltner, Annemarie Kinzelbach, Patrick Naaktgeboren, Carole Rawcliffe, Claire Weeda.
Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.
